In order to provide prompt and convenient service for customers, many companies have established customer support call centers. These centers provide one or more telephone numbers a customer can use to receive service and support information about various products. Typically, a customer experiencing a problem with or having a question about a particular product or service or having questions or difficulty installing or configuring a product or service will call the corresponding support center to receive specific information relating to the question or problem and preferably, instructions for resolving the problem.
However, these customer support call centers suffer from at least the following problems. First, staffing a call center with enough knowledgeable operators, also called agents or customer service representatives, to address a meaningful range of likely problems can be very expensive. The call center must hire enough agents to handle those times when most calls occur, or callers could have excessively long hold times before speaking to an agent. Long hold times are annoying to customers and hurt a company's reputation for providing quality customer service. Long hold times are an even bigger problem when the company does not provide a toll-free number and the caller is required to pay for the call. Thus, a call center might have more agents than needed at any given time with their associated costs.
Second, the time and cost required to train new agents is considerable and in some cases it could be weeks before an agent is allowed to answer a call on his own. Agents staffing the support center must be provided with the knowledge necessary to resolve common product and service related questions and problems. Often, because of the large scope of potential problems, it is simply not practical to impart the required information (i.e. the problem knowledge base) to each agent. For example, many of today's complex products require a team of engineers—each having a specialized area of expertise—to design, build, and service the products. Thus, a single person may not have all the information needed to solve a particular problem.
Third, the job of an agent is often very repetitive, and turnover can be high as agents lose interest in their work and quit their jobs. The most common customer support questions can represent up to 80% of all calls received. Turnover of 50% or greater is not unusual. For example, for a company with 100 agents experiencing 50% turnover, 50 agents would quit in a 12-month period. High turnover adds additional costs to the customer support call center for recruiting and training.
In an attempt to automate call centers, some companies have tried using prerecorded messages to provide answers to various common problems. Typically, a caller will hear simple audio recordings of portions of a spoken dialog that identify specific topics or problems. The caller is asked to press a certain key on his phone to identify the problem he is having. The caller will then hear another simple audio recording in the form of instructions for resolving a particular problem. These automated recordings are presented to the caller using what is called touch-tone Interactive Voice Response (IVR). Although the IVR instructions may resolve the aforementioned problems, the prerecorded solutions lack the flexibility to accept spoken inputs from the customer and tailor the response to the customer's specific situation. In addition, in order that the recordings be kept within a reasonable amount of time (since callers must memorize the instructions), the instructions may be simplified and generalized to such an extent that they do not provide sufficient help for the caller. Often, this results in unresolved problems and customer frustration.
A typical problem experienced when using IVR applications is in enticing the caller to use the application rather than requesting the service of a human agent. While IVR applications are becoming more and more sophisticated with the utilization of ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) having intuitive and easy to use VUIs (Voice User Interfaces), the perception of the user population is not on par with these applications' actual capabilities. In fact, today many IVR applications are capable of completely replacing human agents in handling simple, as well as relatively complex tasks. The benefit for companies deploying IVR based systems is in the reduced TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of the service; i.e. the cost of an automated transaction via an IVR system is certainly lower than the cost of labor of a human agent performing the same task. The benefit for the caller is in the reduced hold time and, in some cases, a more streamlined task completion.
Given the low acceptance of IVR systems by the general population, often based on the wrong perception that their problem cannot be solved by a machine, a number of expedients have been introduced in the past in order to engage callers and convince them to cooperate with the IVR system. One of the main issues is in balancing the caller's ability to barge-in or interrupt the system with the need to listen to some of the prompts or announcements presented by the IVR. Some prompts may contain key information for the callers and help them to realize that the system may indeed help solve their problem. Callers who do not perceive that an IVR system can help in solving their problem, tend to barge-in during the early prompts or announcements in order to request the help of a human operator.
Barge-in is a commonly deployed technology in IVR systems that allows callers who already know the answer to expedite the transaction. Once a barge-in attempt (during the playing of a prompt) is detected by the IVR system, the currently playing prompt is stopped and the caller's input is collected and processed. Callers that barge-in for the reasons discussed above—or for other reasons—are thus not given an opportunity to listen to the whole prompt or announcement, which may contain important information that can help the caller decide whether the IVR system can solve their problem.
A typical solution adopted in previous IVR systems is to disable barge-in for those prompts that include important information. However, by disabling barge-in for some of the prompts, callers may become confused and irritated because they do not understand why they can interrupt some of the prompts and not others. Moreover, non-bargeable prompts often increase a caller's frustration due to a perception that the system is not listening.